RICHLAND CENTER, Wis. — It was a Pride Weekend in Wisconsin, a natural time for the state’s pathbreaking, openly gay senator to rally her Democratic base, but on Sunday, Tammy Baldwin was far away from the parades and gatherings in Madison and Milwaukee — at a dairy farm in Republican Richland County.
“I’ll show up in deep-red counties, and they’ll be like, ‘I can’t remember the last time we’ve seen a sitting U.S. senator here, especially not a Democrat,’” said Baldwin, an hour into her unassuming work of handing out plastic silverware at an annual dairy breakfast, and five months before Wisconsin voters will decide whether to give her a third term. “I think that begins to break through.”
Wisconsin is one of seven states that will determine the presidency this November, but it will also help determine which party controls the Senate. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are running neck-and-neck in the state, which Trump narrowly won in 2016 and Biden took back in 2020.
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Baldwin, by contrast, is running well ahead of the president and her presumed Republican opponent, wealthy banker Eric Hovde. Polls released early last month by The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College found Baldwin holding a lead of 49% to 40% over Hovde. In late May, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report put the spread even wider, 12 percentage points.
That down-ballot Democratic strength is not isolated to Wisconsin. Senate Democratic candidates also hold leads in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. A Marist Poll released Tuesday said Trump led Biden in Ohio by 7 percentage points, but Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, leads his challenger, Bernie Moreno, by 5 percentage points, a 12-point swing.
In a memo of warning, shared with donors, Americans for Prosperity Action, a conservative group focused on helping Republicans reclaim Senate control, said that in states with heated Senate races voters hold a deeply negative view of Biden but positive views of their Democratic senators.
“It’s still early in the race, but we are seeing some of the same warning signs we saw in 2022,” said Bill Riggs, a spokesperson for the group. “So far, voters are not connecting Democrat Senate candidates to the top of the ticket, and despite deep disapproval, Biden hasn’t become the drag you’d expect.”
There isn’t one reason that Democratic Senate candidates are doing so much better than Biden. The policy terrain for congressional candidates may be more favorable than for the president. Most of the Democratic candidates have the power of incumbency, in name recognition and fundraising. And unlike Biden, most have opponents who are not well known and therefore vulnerable to negative attacks.
Over pancakes and cheese curds, Scott Crook, a retired operating engineer in Richland County, echoed the negative advertising against Hovde when he called him a rich guy from California — Democrats have been blasting him over his $7 million home in Laguna Beach, California.
“His money isn’t fooling anybody here,” he said.
Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, said Senate Democratic candidates were running on the president’s agenda. It has benefited them, and ultimately will benefit Biden.
“In 2022, Democrats had the best midterm performance by a president’s party in decades because the Biden-Harris agenda is incredibly popular,” she said, citing abortion rights and controls on drug prices. “President Biden’s record won at the ballot box in 2022, and it will win again in 2024.”
Republican Senate campaign aides dismissed any concerns as well. Reagan McCarthy, a spokesperson for Moreno, noted that as Moreno digs his way out of a brutal primary season, Brown has the support of barely more than 40% of voters — “a death spot for any incumbent.”
Elizabeth Gregory, a spokesperson for Dave McCormick, the Republican challenging Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, pointed to the Times’ poll, which has Casey at 46% against McCormick’s 41%. “Incumbent senators with Bob Casey’s poll numbers at this point almost always lose,” she said, “and he will, too.”
But for many reasons, Senate Democratic candidates just have it easier than Biden. On the policy front, they are far less encumbered by controversies that have the president crosswise between his party’s left flank and the broad center of the electorate. Voters by and large don’t expect Senate candidates to shape U.S. foreign policy in Israel, nor do they hold a porous U.S.-Mexican border against them.
“They don’t blame her for all the things they blame President Biden for,” said Pam Flick, a retired educator and a Democrat from Richland Center, Wisconsin.
As Biden balances priorities, including contentious issues like extracting billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine, Democratic candidates can more narrowly zoom in on issues like lowering child care costs — which Baldwin talked up Monday in Milwaukee.
“Without question,” Baldwin said of whether the president should focus more on kitchen-table issues. “You’ve seen him tackle things like junk fees; that move alone is wildly popular. What he hasn’t done yet is connect the dots — that he’s the one who’s cracking down.”
As Biden worked this spring to shore up flagging support among young progressives, canceling student debt against the inclinations of more moderate voters and framing the election as a struggle to save democracy, Senate Democratic candidates were buttressing their images with the center-left and center-right voters they will need in swing states.
Brown went on the air to play up his bipartisan work to bring semiconductor manufacturing to Ohio, never mentioning Biden’s name, though the president was instrumental in passing the legislation, known as the CHIPS and Science Act. An ad running in Nevada has Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat, promoting herself as “one of the most bipartisan senators” who worked with both parties to help veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in Iraq. Again, Biden goes unmentioned on one of his signature legislative achievements, the PACT Act.
A recent ad by Casey in Pennsylvania did one better, featuring hard-hatted workers declaring, “Our own government turned their backs on us, using Chinese steel to build our infrastructure,” adding, “Bob Casey said no way.” Viewers could be forgiven for concluding that “our government” was Biden’s, even though the president muscled through the “buy American” provision for steel in his infrastructure bill.
But campaign aides in both parties caution not to read too much into the Senate Democrats’ policy plays, communication skills or strategic maneuvering. Their biggest advantages are much more obvious: Democratic senators running for reelection in Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have the power of incumbency on their side, working against Republican challengers who are far less known.
And that could matter most.
“We’re so darned busy, we don’t pay attention to politics,” said Sherry Nelson, 70, who co-owns the Huff-Nel-Sons Farm that hosted Sunday’s dairy breakfast, along with her husband, Larry Nelson, 69. But, she added of Baldwin, “I think she’s doing a fine job.”
As for the presidential contest, both Nelsons were extremely disappointed on their choices.
“It’s a flip of the coin,” Larry Nelson said of his vote in November. “That’s about it.”
Biden and Trump are running as incumbent versus incumbent, with neither having an edge in name identification and both saddled with entrenched negative images.
As Andrew Mamo, a strategist with the Baldwin campaign, put it, he’s trying to shape the opinions of 50% of Wisconsin’s voters who don’t know the Republican in this race, and so therefore can be swayed by negative advertising. The Biden campaign actually has to change some people’s minds about Trump, and that is among the hardest jobs in politics. Voters don’t tend to like to admit they were wrong.
The exceptions prove the rule. In Michigan, where Rep. Elissa Slotkin is running for the seat of Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who is retiring, her lead over her expected Republican challenger, former Rep. Mike Rogers, is within the margin of error in most polls, with at least a quarter of Michigan voters undecided. Neither candidate is an incumbent. Both come from the Lansing area, with much of Michigan unfamiliar with them.
In the Arizona Senate race to replace Kyrsten Sinema after her retirement, Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, does hold a consistent lead over his Republican opponent, former news anchor Kari Lake. But that may be because the better known candidate is Lake, and she is not liked, not since she refused to accept defeat in her failed run for governor in 2022.
Mike Berg, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said with Republican candidates still introducing themselves, the more important polling number is the Democrats’ vote share, which in most cases is below 50%.
“Our candidates still have significant room to grow,” he said, adding, “these Democrats are going to win or lose with Biden regardless of their eleventh-hour attempts to create distance from him after backing every single one of his disastrous policies.”
He may have a point. In the last two presidential elections, only a single candidate, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, won a race in a state that went for the opposite party’s presidential nominee.
“The fact of the matter is there is less ticket splitting today than at any other time in American history,” Berg said.
Republicans already have an advantage in their quest to take back the chamber. The GOP has all but won the seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a deeply red state. To keep control of the Senate, Democrats will have to win every single swing state race, plus their two races in Republican-leaning Montana and Ohio, unless somehow Democratic challengers defy the odds against Republican incumbents in Texas, Florida or Missouri.
But if Republicans want to run up the score, they should not be complacent, cautioned Brian Walsh, a Republican strategist once with the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
“Certainly no one’s panicking,” he said, “but for Republicans who think Biden’s unpopularity is just going to translate down to these other Democrats, look at 2022,” when the president was similarly unpopular and the Democrats actually gained a seat in the Senate.
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